February 16, 2008

Running From Despair

By JOE SPRING

SANTA FE, N.M.  On a cold Saturday morning last month, 16-year-old Chantel Hunt ran across a highway onto a gravel road where the snow under her shoes packed into washboard ripples. She ran around a towering red rock butte, past two old mattresses dumped on the roadside, and into the shadow of a mesa she sometimes runs on top of.

Hunt, a high school junior and a resident of the Navajo Nation, was on a short training run for the national cross-country championships being held Saturday in San Diego. Her team, Wings of America, has risen to prominence with an unlikely collection of athletes. It is a group of American Indians from reservations around the country, and a Wings team has won a boys or a girls national title 20 times since first attending a championship meet in 1988.

“You say Wings of America to anyone in the running community  it’s synonymous with the best Native American runners,” said Eric Heins, the cross-country and distance coach at Northern Arizona University, a program that has benefited from having Wings runners in recent years.

American Indians have especially high rates of youth suicide, Type 2 diabetes and deaths attributed to alcoholism, and extreme poverty is pervasive on many reservations. Wings of America, a 20-year-old nonprofit organization based here, has embraced the challenge.

“The hardest part is getting people to understand, to make the case how important it is,” said Anne Wheelock Gonzales, the organization’s former executive director who now serves as a consultant. “One time someone said, ‘Well, it’s not like you’re saving lives.’ And I said: ‘Excuse me, we are saving lives. That’s exactly what this does.’ ”

Dillon Shije, another member of the Wings team who will be competing Saturday, runs 60 to 70 miles a week around Zia Pueblo, near Albuquerque. He zigzags between junipers and cactuses on trails, and he sometimes runs five miles up an arroyo.

“Those are typical running trails all over the reservations,” said Alvina Begay, 27, a former Wings runner who will compete in the United States women’s Olympic marathon trials in April.

Shije, a 16-year-old high school junior, commutes an hour each way to attend Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque. In the winter, when the light is short and his training regimen requires running before dawn and after dusk, Shije will run while his mother drives behind him on dirt roads with the headlights on.

“Sometimes I need the extra push from the car,” he said. “The honk.”

In the Navajo Nation, where Hunt lives, many of the statistics concerning health problems are even higher than for the overall numbers for American Indians. A study in the American Journal of Public Health showed that nearly 15 percent of youths in the Navajo Nation in grades 6-12 had attempted suicide. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 40 percent of adults ages 45 and older had Type 2 diabetes, and that the rates were increasing among children.

“There’s this element of historical post-traumatic stress that’s occurred in Indian communities,” said Dr. Chuck North, the chief medical officer for Indian Health Services. “The history of Native Americans in the United States is one of loss: losing land, losing language, losing culture and losing family members.”

More than 180,000 people live on the Navajo Nation, which spreads over 27,000 square miles in Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. Unemployment hovers at about 40 percent. More than three-quarters of the 6,184 miles of roads are not paved. Roughly half the homes lack plumbing.

Hunt lives on reservation land about 15 miles from Navajo, N.M., in a small two-bedroom house at an elevation of about 8,000 feet. Navajo has about 2,100 residents, and 64 percent of the families are below the poverty level. Her family drives into a town called Crystal each week to fill a 1,000-gallon cistern with water. They chop and haul wood in the winter to heat their home.

“We camp year-round,” said Delores Hunt, Chantel’s mother.

The Navajo culture centers on strong women. The Navajo believe that Father Sky and Mother Earth gave birth to Changing Woman, a deity who has the power to change her age with the seasons by walking to the horizon. When a Navajo girl comes of age and has her first period, the community celebrates with a rite of passage called the Kinaalda. For four days, the girl re-enacts the role of Changing Woman, waking up before dawn and running east, toward the sunrise.

The longer a girl runs, the longer she will live.

“You build up your strength by running,” said Mary Willie, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona and the coordinator of its Native American Languages and Linguistics program. “You are also reflecting back what the Navajo people value: being responsible, being able to take care of yourself and your family, hard work and perseverance.”

Wings holds a high school coaching clinic and about 30 youth summer camps each year. Hunt was a facilitator at one of the camps after eighth grade.

Hunt played traditional games with large groups of young children and talked to them about avoiding drugs and alcohol, and about eating healthy. But even with education, the ability for families to change their diets is difficult because extreme poverty and remote living conditions can make obtaining fresh food difficult.

“Sometimes we go to areas and kids have never seen a fresh avocado,” said Kelly Concho-Hayes, a consultant for Wings. “One summer ago, a kid said, ‘Tomatoes are bright red?’ ”

Many runners who go through the program end up as teachers, coaches and health professionals. This year’s girls coach, Jill Jim, attends the University of Utah, where she is working toward a master’s degree in public health and health care administration.

Hunt said she started running year-round in ninth grade, “because I decided I’d have a better chance of getting scholarships and being noticed.”

She ran old logging roads through pines, on the packed dirt trails her grandparents herded sheep over, on game trails carved by deer, and through aspens to the top of a roughly 9,000-foot peak.

She said her older brother, Arvid, pushed her. They ran on clay roads past other remote homes, saving energy for sprints.

“That dog on the side is the one we watch out for,” Arvid said as he pointed at what looked like a pit bull mix. “We save our energy so when we come through here we can do a speed workout for a half-mile.”

Hunt’s experience at the Wings camp was a boon to her high school cross-country team at Navajo Pine. As a freshman, she was the team’s top runner, and at a meeting halfway through the season she challenged her teammates to work harder.

“That transformation in the team came from the transformation in Tails,” said Tim Host, one of Navajo Pine’s coaches, referring to Hunt by her nickname.

The team did not win the state title that year, but it did the next two. Hunt led the team each time with top-five finishes.

In six years, Navajo Pine’s two coaches, Host and Gavin Sosa, have seen the cross-country team grow to about 45 from 12, with the boys winning three consecutive state titles and the girls winning two in a row.

During the state finals in the two-mile her freshman year, Hunt recalled, she fell to sixth place and became frustrated. “I just got tired, and asked myself: Why am I doing this? I don’t have to,” she said. “And I said, No, keep going, keep going.”

Hunt, wearing a blue uniform, passed one girl after another on the last lap. In the final 100 meters she had one girl to beat, Cassandra Sanchez from Acoma.

They started sprinting around the corner. “The crowd was cheering,” Hunt said. “It was a head-to-head race.”

Having watched “Chariots of Fire” multiple times, Hunt said, she knew what to do. “I was pumping my arms, and I could hear Cassandra breathing,” she said. “And right at the end I leaned.”

After throwing her weight forward without fear, she heard the race official say: “Blue’s got it. Blue’s got it.”